ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the cultural affinities and resonances of Zen in the significantly diverse phases of Stevens’s poetics – which I refer to as ‘early’ and ‘late’ Stevens – foreground the complex relationship between material reality and the poetic imagination. In the early Stevens, material reality is reduced to a function of human cognition and regarded as a source of human subjectivity. On the other hand, the late Stevens emphasises the insufficiency of subjective experience and the ineffability of material reality. The chapter also argues that, in the late poems, the imagination ceases to be a mere process of the human mind and, instead, becomes embedded in the dynamic and universal agency of extra-human material reality. The imagination becomes the vital force of cosmological consciousness embedded in his poetics, contributing to the expansion of current definitions of ecopoetics into an active cosmopoetics.
